This article is from | Multicoin Capital

Translation | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)_

Translator | Azuma (@azuma_eth)_

Editor’s Note: Multicoin Capital may be one of the most controversial yet also one of the most convincing VCs in the industry.

By the end of 2024, Mike Dudas, founder of 6th Man Ventures and former founder of The Block, revealed that Multicoin Capital has achieved an 18.6x return since the market bottomed in 2022.

Another well-known VC, Hasseb Qureshi, a partner at Dragonfly Capital, also gave high praise to Multicoin Capital. Hasseb even called Multicoin Capital co-founder Kyle Samani the best investor in the cryptocurrency space: “As competitors, Dragonfly and Multicoin are always at odds, but experts recognize experts; investing is like a sport, and Kyle is the highest scorer in history, unmatched by anyone.”

In the following text, several partners from Multicoin Capital share their perspectives on the narratives leading up to 2025, which may hide the next opportunity to ignite the market.

2025 will be a pivotal year for the cryptocurrency industry. The first regulatory framework supporting cryptocurrencies is about to be introduced, and with the maturation of Layer1, DeFi, DePIN, and stablecoins, these factors create fertile ground for the next wave of frontier innovation.

In keeping with our tradition, we will share the ideas and opportunities that excite us the most for the coming year.

Narrative One: DePIN Robotics, Zero-Employee Companies

Recommender: Kyle Samani (Co-founder of Multicoin Capital)

DePIN Robotics

There have long been rumors that the incoming Trump administration will attempt to push autonomous driving (AD) regulations from the state level to the national level, creating a unified standard for autonomous driving companies. With GPU clusters exceeding 100,000 H100s, transformer-based autonomous driving is about to be ready for the real world. After this, I expect explosive growth in DePIN based on robotics. Many startups have already raised funds from VCs outside the crypto space but have yet to truly commercialize. I am optimistic that many of these companies will adopt the DePIN model, spreading risk from the balance sheets of development companies to robotics professionals and specialized consumers around the world. Many early adopters of these robotic products will capture data critical to the development of autonomous robots. To my knowledge, there is already a company in this field called Frodobots, and I look forward to more companies joining in. Our investment project Hivemapper, while not explicitly a robotics company, is also exploring similar ideas.

Zero-Employee Companies

The foundation of zero-employee companies is AI. With the help of OpenAI's o3 and other more advanced chain-of-thought reasoning models, AI models are gradually achieving thinking, planning, execution, and self-correction. This lays the groundwork for AI agents to perform all tasks within a business. For a zero-employee company to operate normally, it will certainly require human guidance, as AI will inevitably make mistakes and is likely to encounter situations beyond its capabilities. However, over time, I expect AI to continuously improve its self-correcting abilities and expand its working scenarios, leading to a gradual reduction in the level of human guidance. I believe that the governance of these zero-employee companies is likely to be realized through DAOs, and I anticipate that the cryptocurrency capital markets will provide autonomy to those ambitious zero-employee companies.

Startups often succeed where large companies fail because large companies always face various constraints. I believe that zero employees equal zero constraints, which will bring some incredible breakthroughs in actual business operations.

Trend Two: On-Chain Securities

Recommender: Tushar Jain

With the Trump administration coming to power and the Republican sweep in Congress, on-chain securities are finally ready to take off.

Transactions on blockchains like Solana can be completed almost instantaneously, eliminating the waiting times commonly required in traditional finance. Faster capital movement can improve capital efficiency and should lead to more effective price discovery.

Blockchains ensure that all participants have access to real-time, immutable transaction records. This transparency and security stand in stark contrast to the opaque and sometimes risky centralized databases in traditional finance. The transaction costs on blockchain networks are significantly lower than those in traditional banking systems; just compare the cost of sending stablecoins on Solana ($0.001) with the cost of sending a bank wire ($30). Today, Solana's token expansion can achieve the precise granular control required for tokenized securities, allowing issuers to restrict the holders of their securities to whitelisted addresses, recall tokens in the case of court orders, and comply with other securities laws or transfer agent requirements.

There is no doubt that the near-instant finality, low transaction costs, and transparency of blockchain provide a better settlement method compared to slow, expensive, and opaque trading systems. The only real barrier is regulatory issues, and a more innovation-friendly U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) could open the door for the tokenization of securities.

I do not believe that public equity will be the first tokenized security adopted by the mass market. More likely, some illiquid and opaque markets will benefit from tokenization first, such as equity in startups. When blockchains can manage your balance sheet for free, there is no reason to pay Carta or Angelist to manage it anymore. Additionally, the first to achieve tokenization may also be fixed-income instruments that Figure has been researching for years, or LP interests in funds.

Trend Three: Buy Now, Pay Never, Portfolio Consumption, Portfolio Margin

Recommender: Spencer Applebaum

According to Tushar's ideas, when all assets can be programmed and traded on-chain, we will begin to see interesting new products emerge. Here are a few examples.

Buy Now, Pay Never

Affirm and Klarna have promoted the concept of "Buy Now, Pay Never," and I believe you have seen this feature on Amazon and other merchant websites. Nowadays, on-chain users can earn about 8% and 15% on SOL and stablecoins, respectively. What if users do not need to pay subscription fees upfront but instead deposit tokens with merchants (from Web2 companies like Netflix to Web3 companies like Dune Analytics), allowing merchants to earn fixed deposit/loan rewards over time? The users' tokens would be locked for a period to guarantee payment. We believe this contains an interesting psychological game of consumption, which seems more acceptable to consumers than prepayment.

Portfolio Consumption

When all assets are tokenized and aggregated in one place (Web3 wallet), users can use their portfolios to pay for some large and medium-sized purchases. Imagine, for example, that Alice has $10,000 in BTC, $10,000 in yield-generating USDC, $10,000 in TSLA stock, and $10,000 in gold. Now she wants to buy a $4,000 sofa. Instead of converting USDC to fiat and paying through a bank, then reversing the operation to reconstitute her portfolio, a better method would be to sell $1,000 of each of the four held assets on-chain and immediately pay the seller. She can still maintain her existing portfolio allocation without worrying about rebalancing.

Portfolio Margin

3-5 years from now, as cryptocurrency prime brokers and unified super protocols emerge, users should be able to use all their assets as cross-margin. For example, Alice should be able to use her AAPL stock as collateral to short BTC and borrow USDC on-chain; or collateralize her tokenized whiskey and then purchase tokenized bonds on-chain. We are already beginning to see this synthetic approach (for example, Ostium has brought forex trading on-chain), but this model will become clearer when spot assets are tokenized.

Trend Four: Off-Chain Verification of On-Chain State

Recommender: Shayon Sengupta

Assets ledgers like Bitcoin and Solana represent the "0 to 1" moment of cryptocurrency. These systems are fundamentally about money—they facilitate the storage and transfer of value globally in a permissionless manner. We are now seeing cryptographic primitives that make these systems possible beginning to intersect with non-ledger systems in a way that unlocks entirely new markets. In the next 12 months, cryptography will become a verification layer for data and computation in three new ways: "network proofs," "privacy-preserving data processing," and "identity/content provenance verification." I believe this is a fusion of monetary cryptography and verification cryptography—the coordination layer will enable new economic primitives and incentive structures.

zkTLS refers to building zero-knowledge proofs on top of web TLS signatures to verify any data unit on the internet (such as your credit score on Equifax or your Strava activity history) in a completely unobservable and tamper-proof manner. Many teams have already deployed zk proofs on web sessions to build tamper-proof and anti-fraud applications. Our investments in p2p.me and ZkMe are early examples. p2p.me is a cash withdrawal platform in India that leverages network proofs to navigate the fragmented market structure in the region. ZkMe is a sovereign verification system for KYC credentials that allows applications to verify user identities in a privacy-preserving manner. The same fundamental principles can be extended to dozens of new markets—ticketing, reservations, and other systems where fraud is a major bottleneck to liquidity.

Secondly, fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is about to enter a golden age. As the returns on training AI systems on public datasets diminish, late-stage training and fine-tuning in private or confidential environments will become increasingly critical. This creates a new design space for coordinating datasets that were previously inaccessible as model inputs—especially as vast amounts of valuable enterprise and consumer data continue to migrate from local systems to the cloud. At this layer, token-based incentives will be crucial, and breakthroughs in this area will elevate state-of-the-art foundational models to new levels.

Thirdly, identity and content provenance verification systems will become fixtures in post-AI era consumer applications. As the cost of generating content approaches zero, the proliferation of synthetic content will create a strong demand for proving the authenticity of content and identity. Early systems like Worldcoin, Humanity Protocol, and Humancode use cryptographic proofs based on biometrics or government-issued credentials to establish human identity, employing token incentives as the primary call to action to mobilize participants at scale. Similarly, standards like C2PA determine content provenance by marking content at the hardware level to distinguish between authentic content and AI-generated content, but their widespread adoption at the application layer may require some form of token coordination. Given consumer inertia, these tools will play a key role in addressing information risks in the consumer internet after AI saturation.

Trend Five: Trading Social, Full-Stack Media Companies

Recommender: Eli Qian

Trading Social (Trading Goes Multiplayer)

Sharing financial gains and losses, and collective speculation is a deeply human and highly contagious behavior. People love to talk about how much they have made (or lost) in stocks, sports betting, memecoins, and more. However, most popular cryptocurrency, stock, and sports betting trading platforms are designed for individual experiences. Platforms like Robinhood, FanDuel, and BONKBot do not focus on collective trading experiences. Nevertheless, the demand for "trading + social" is undeniable. Nowadays, users create temporary social experiences through online forums and group chats, with much of the content on Crypto Twitter revolving around these discussions.

One of the biggest advantages of cryptocurrency is permissionless liquidity. It opens the door to building multiplayer trading tools for crypto assets that anyone can participate in. In 2025, I would love to see someone leverage the viral nature of "trading social" to create a better multiplayer trading experience. Such a product could allow users to share trading results, compete on performance, and "get on board" together with a simple click. The design space for such products is vast, including Telegram bots, Twitter Blinks, Discord mini-programs, and more. In 2023 and 2024, we witnessed the rise of personal trading tools like BONKBot and BullX, and 2025 will be the year trading moves towards multiplayer.

Full-Stack Media Companies

There have been numerous attempts to optimize media and content using tokens, but few have fully realized their potential. However, we are beginning to see the rise of media companies that control content production end-to-end. These "full-stack" media companies have the ability to elevate the fundamental principles of cryptocurrency to a higher level.

Karate Combat is an example. Karate Combat did not create products around existing UFC fighters but instead built a new fighting league from scratch, giving them more control over rules, distribution, and athletes. While the utility of tokens for UFC fighters is limited, Karate Combat allows token holders to vote on fighters' training regimens, competition gear, or anything else—this is made possible because Karate Combat controls both the design of the tokens and the contracts of the fighters.

Future live broadcasts, sports leagues, podcasts, and reality game shows will undergo deep vertical integration in terms of content, distribution, tokens, and human capital. I am eager to invest in and consume media that utilizes tokens for iteration.

Trend Six: The Rise of "Alpha Hunters"

Recommender: Vishal Kankani

Several significant events occurred in 2024, signaling that interesting developments will emerge in 2025.

First, anyone can launch a new token for about $0 without permission. This has led to an astonishing number of tokens launched in 2024, most of which are meme tokens with half-lives measured in hours.

Secondly, market sentiment in 2024 has shifted back to "high liquidity, low FDV, fair distribution" token offerings—reminiscent of the ICO era in 2017. In this type of market, centralized exchanges (CEX) struggle to keep pace with new developments, and we expect this to happen in 2025 (due to their listing processes), which will incentivize people to move on-chain and drive more liquidity towards decentralized exchanges (DEX). Therefore, in the coming year, DEX will continue to consume market share from CEX. With the explosive growth in the number of tokens and DEX activity, active traders will need more powerful tools and models to identify newly emerging tokens, analyze sentiment and on-chain metrics, identify vulnerabilities, mitigate risks, and execute trades efficiently—all of which need to be done in real-time.

This leads to the third event that occurred in 2024: the explosion of AI agents. So far, we have seen AI agents creating content on social media to attract attention to their respective tokens. I anticipate that the next generation of AI agents will be "alpha hunters," capable of hunting for alpha opportunities around the clock and trading autonomously in real-time.

Trend Seven: Institutional Frenzy

Recommender: Matt Shapiro

We have just entered the beginning of the institutionalization phase of cryptocurrency, which will happen at a dizzying pace.

Over the past five years, the cryptocurrency industry has made significant progress through major technological advancements, product-market fit, and substantial improvements in UI/UX, yet institutional adoption of cryptocurrency has stagnated. The combination of regulatory risk and career risk has prevented many financial institutions from effectively entering this space, even failing to offer their clients the most basic crypto products. With pro-crypto governments coming to power in the U.S. and the record success of BTC ETFs, we are about to see institutions that have been complacent for five years scrambling to catch up and find ways to support cryptocurrency as quickly as possible.

In 2024, there was a demand for $35 billion in BTC purchases, but this demand could not or would not be met through Coinbase. As most asset management firms and major brokerages have yet to fully open up, more dollars will access cryptocurrency in 2025. We will see a plethora of ETFs launched to meet and tap into this demand. This will include ETFs for new crypto assets like SOL, ETFs holding multiple crypto assets, and other ETFs that mix crypto assets with traditional assets like gold, stocks, or credit. There will also be leveraged ETFs, inverse ETFs, volatility-suppressing ETFs, staking ETFs, and more. Essentially, every conceivable combination of packaging crypto assets for institutional and retail investors will be explored.

We will see major financial firms competing to offer foundational financial products around cryptocurrency. Every financial institution should explore and create product lines that enable clients to trade crypto products. Financial institutions should seek to custody crypto assets and issue loans against these assets, just as they do today with other traditional assets. We may also see a significant increase in stablecoin issuers. Any bank accepting deposits should seek to issue stablecoins. In my conversation with Visa's Cuy Sheffield at the 2024 Multicoin Summit, I mentioned that every company needs to develop a stablecoin strategy. In the past, companies focused on "e-commerce," and now stablecoins will also move in that direction.

These are just the tip of the iceberg; while this may not be the most technically ambitious part of the cryptocurrency space, the scope of distribution and the scale of capital involved will be enormous.

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